This is a study of black masculinities produced in two distinct bodies of 1960s and 1970s
texts: ethnographic accounts of black urban families and black men's self-narratives. Those
seemingly incompatible genres of writing are treated on a par as narrative spaces within which
social identities are forged and negotiated. Part I of this book offers a critical analysis of
social science literature since the mid- to late 1960s. It includes the controversial Moynihan
Report which has been center stage of debates about black matriarchy race relations and
social policy as well as ethnographies by Ulf Hannerz David A. Schulz and Kenneth B. Clark.
It is against the backdrop of the ethnographic research that Part II investigates discursive
continuities as well as ruptures in the articulation of black masculinities in Dick Gregory's
and Claude Brown's narratives of success and counter-hegemonic prison writings by Black Panther
Party leaders: Bobby Seale Eldridge Cleaver and George Jackson.
